Even though the interest of people about the pandemic is waning, COVID and other new viruses — notably mpox, HIV and polio are enough cause for concern for coming year 2023.
The outbreak of the COVID Omicron variant, believed to be a step more dangerous than its sibling around the world, has been a critical test to vaccines success rates.
More baffling is the strange subset of people, mostly Africans who never seem to get COVID, while the west accounted for catastrophic mortality rates despite high tech virus detection systems and prompt attention to the provision of virus, social supports and funding.
All these were lacking in most of the third world countries which by some strange acts, survived the global onslaught.
But just as we were all wrapping our minds around COVID variants, and feeling relieved by the ideas that viruses might weaken out over time, suddenly, we are hit by a more contagious and severe HIV variant and global outbreaks of vaccine-derived polio.
As if by some timed release, a serious global outbreak of monkeypox or mpox came on so suddenly that the US declared a public health emergency.
Symptoms of the monkeypox virus in most instances, are fever and painful, pus-filled blisters. New cases in the United Kingdom, Spain and Portugal are spreading possibly through sexual contact, which had not previously been linked to monkeypox transmission.
In 2022 viruses took the shine away from public health and recreation, and provided little or no respite from the virus unslaught of the years before. As soon as you felt you had one virus figured out another would pop up, and followed by a variant of the first one.
Do some people have built-in protection against a COVID infection?